April 08, 2008

I just had a great collaborative experience with a client. Last week she contacted me about an issue she was experiencing when displaying a discussion thread on their SharePoint intranet. She had tried to display the RSS feed of the discussion thread, and had encountered the authentication issue we all know and love when you try to use Sharepoint's built-in RSS reader to display a SharePoint list or library:

My developer colleague was at their site that week, and he suggested using the Content Query Web Part as a way to display the information. She set this up successfully, with one hitch: replies to posts appeared as (Blank):

She tried on her own to fix this, then asked me for help. As with so many situations in SharePoint, this issue is related to content types. Discussion board posts are of content type "discussion," whereas replies are of content type "message" (which does not contain a Title field, which is what the CQWP is looking for). My client did not want to show the replies to posts, so I was able to filter them out by setting the CQWP filter as follows:

Good to go! She can now display her company's bulletin board anywhere on their Intranet.

This solution felt good because it was a tripartite collaboration - the developer's suggestion of the CQWP to get around the RSS issue, the client's independent and successful setup of the CQWP, and my tweak based on prior experience with content types. My company's goal is to empower our clients to make the most of their SharePoint implementation once we get it up and running. It doesn't always work out that way but it feels great when it does.

Comments

I just had a great collaborative experience with a client. Last week she contacted me about an issue she was experiencing when displaying a discussion thread on their SharePoint intranet. She had tried to display the RSS feed of the discussion thread, and had encountered the authentication issue we all know and love when you try to use Sharepoint's built-in RSS reader to display a SharePoint list or library:

My developer colleague was at their site that week, and he suggested using the Content Query Web Part as a way to display the information. She set this up successfully, with one hitch: replies to posts appeared as (Blank):

She tried on her own to fix this, then asked me for help. As with so many situations in SharePoint, this issue is related to content types. Discussion board posts are of content type "discussion," whereas replies are of content type "message" (which does not contain a Title field, which is what the CQWP is looking for). My client did not want to show the replies to posts, so I was able to filter them out by setting the CQWP filter as follows:

Good to go! She can now display her company's bulletin board anywhere on their Intranet.

This solution felt good because it was a tripartite collaboration - the developer's suggestion of the CQWP to get around the RSS issue, the client's independent and successful setup of the CQWP, and my tweak based on prior experience with content types. My company's goal is to empower our clients to make the most of their SharePoint implementation once we get it up and running. It doesn't always work out that way but it feels great when it does.